To start the new year off with a bang, feast your eyes on this gobsmackingly gorgeous kitchen.
I don’t even remember how Joe Oliver and I became acquainted, but I’m so glad we did. Joe operates Retro Stove & Gas Works based in Chicago and shares my love of old kitchens. Two days ago he sent some snapshots from a recent repair job in a kitchen that’s a treasure trove of original detail. I’m hoping Joe’s customers will allow me to include their kitchen in the book I’m writing for Lost Art Press. In the meantime, here are a few photos provided by the homeowner to whet your appetite.
Although the range hood, island and microwave are not original, the Sellers cabinets are. Check out that tiled arch over the window. My heart! I am mad for this kitchen. Joe points out that the yellow tiles are not ceramic, but a sheet material such as linoleum.Joe identifies this as a pre-World War II Roper. Those control knobs have me swooning.
You can read more about this kitchen and Joe’s approach to repair work at his blog. My favorite quote:
Not all 7 1/2 hour service calls take the same amount of time to prepare for, thank God. Most take between 30 to 60 minutes. Occasionally, however, the needs of a vintage stove push your friendly service technicians to extremes. So when you require help for that 3/4-century old stove which hasn’t required a dime for repairs all the years that you’ve owned it, please grant us some understanding when we charge a service fee to show up at your door. We have probably earned it.
“Fig. 1 An Archer In Action” from “Making a Long-Bow,” The Woodworker magazine, January 1953
“There is always something solemn about the passing of the Old Year. When we were young and the years were very, very long, each New Year’s Eve was an event, the more enthralling for its rarity, and the year ahead still so closely wrapped in the mists of time was full of enticing mystery, something to be explored, one more step forward in the exciting and rather bewildering process of growing up. Breathlessly we listened to the bells, feeling suddenly a little sad as they tolled out the last moments of the dying year, awed into silence in the hush that followed and all the world seemed to wait. Then the lovely, changing peals ushering in the New, and how they rang, those bells of our youth! Is it fancy or have they lost something of their clamorous zest, or is it we who have changed, we who no longer greet them with the old bright-eyed eagerness? Yet there are few men who will not feel a ghost of the old thrill still knocking at their hearts, that here is once more a new beginning, one more opportunity to be seized, as our ever shortening, speeding years are warning us, and turned to account.
“‘Life wastes itself whilst we are preparing to live,’ Emerson once wrote. To live we have to jerk ourselves into action and convert our pleasant pipe dreams into sober realities. The man who has a creative urge to make things, with the vague feeling that he could if once he got down to it, has determinedly to set his hand to a job. So has the man who can make and mend in a plain, competent fashion, but has a hankering for something more, some finer, more ambitious work. If we set ourselves to do the thing, then the power and ability will grow with the doing. If we only keep on vaguely wishing then life will slide away from us and we shall have lost something that might have given us infinite satisfaction. The plain fact which sometimes we are chary of facing is that no atom of good or satisfaction can come to us than by the work we put into this job of making ourselves. Here we are, men with creative instincts, hidden or only dimly realised potentialities, and until we put ourselves to the task of developing them they will remain for ever dormant. No one but ourselves knows what we can do and we ourselves do not know until we have tried. Often, indeed, we scare ourselves off by over timidity. The only way is to start. Tell ourselves we are no worse than the next man: what he can do we can do, and so we can. For steadily and surely those submerged instincts turn into practical ability as we learn by doing.
“It is extraordinary how opportunities come our way for learning once we have started. There seems to be some hidden law governing it, making us aware of new possibilities, new avenues of interest to be explored while we are pegging away at the job of turning ourselves into first-rate craftsmen. It may be only our new awareness, making us see and seize the opportunities, and yet it seems more than that. As if, like the man in the parable, when a man buried his talent he loses even the little he has but, using it, not only is it increased a hundredfold by his own enterprise but more is added unto him, sometimes much more.
“In my time I have made many good resolutions on New Year’s Eve and broken them all. Now, after the passage of the years, there is only one I would make, and that is more a prayer than a resolution. It is for the gift of perseverance. Whatever kind of job of creative living to which we have each put our hands, as good craftsmen, homemakers, as men of integrity and faith and good hopes let us persevere in it, putting our best into it, keeping our interest and enthusiasm alive by the study of good work whenever we can find it and setting our standards by that alone. There are so many things which conspire to turn us aside from the path we want to follow, fascinating things, distracting things, like television, the importunities of our friends, and our own moods and difficulties. We are each of us assailed from this side and that with ever possible temptation to take the easy way and to content ourselves with the minimum necessary effort. But there is not much satisfaction to be got in the long run out of living like that. ‘A man,’ says Emerson, ‘is relieved and gay when has put his heart into his work and done his best: but what he has said or done otherwise shall give him no peace. It is a deliverance which does not deliver.’ Haven’t we all experienced it? The nagging uneasiness which follows an imperfect or hastily finished job, the blemish which will always catch our own eye if others do not notice, on the other hand the glow of satisfaction when we know our work is good. Those are the moments which are worth living for – the moments which pave the way to solid achievement.”
– Charles Hayward, The Woodworker magazine, January, 1953
With the dugout chair complete and installed in the Lost Art Press Mechanical Library, I can move onto the next item on my long list of things I need to build before I die.
Next up is a Klismos chair, an elegant form of seating that emerged in Greece in the fifth century B.C.E. Its popularity as a form has waxed and waned as Classicism and Gothic have grappled through the centuries.
At times it has been interpreted as a study in form. It also has been carved, gilded and padded so as to be almost unrecognizable. The curve of its saber legs have been flattened to add stability. The backrest has been made smaller to make it easier to mass-produce. In fact, the only indignity it hasn’t suffered is to have been injection molded and sold at a Walmart.
My approach will be similar to that of Nicolai Abildgaard (1743-1809), the Danish painter, professor and sculptor who designed the chair shown at the top of this blog entry.
Researcher Suzanne Ellison and I went through a heavy “Klismos and Curule” phase together several years ago. That’s because my early drafts for “The Anarchist’s Design Book” had a large section that explored classical forms such as the Klismos and Curule and wove those forms into the long history of high and low styles. Then I realized I wanted to finish that book before my hair grew all the way down to my hinder. So I nixed that section (which could be a book in itself).
I’m returning to the Klismos because of one simple change in the world: I now have a reliable supply of cold-bend hardwood from Pure Timber. This stuff allows me to make extreme bends with a high level of accuracy and resulting strength.
But first I’ve got to get “Ingenious Mechanicks” to the printer (plus three other books that are almost complete). Oh, and some commission work so as to stave off ramen.
Can there ever be too many ways of learning to carve acanthus leaves?
My new book, “Carving the Acanthus Leaf,” has full and complete step-by-step instructions on how to carve a variety of different historical acanthus leaves using hundreds of detailed photos and drawings. However, as we all have different styles of learning, sometimes written instruction is not enough to fully comprehend the carving process. So in addition to the book, I am now offering full HD video lessons and resin study casts that go with Chapters 4 through 16 of my book.
If you are familiar with my Online School of Traditional Woodcarving, the video lessons are similar in teaching structure style, showing real-time video with close-up details and tool identification throughout the lesson. Also, if you are a Premium Member of my school, you will receive a 15 percent loyalty discount to these video lessons.
The resin study casts are direct replicas made from the original wood-carved leaves from these chapters. Having something that you can view, hold in your hands, and study the details can greatly help in the learning process. (Or … you can use these as decorative details in your home.)
One way or another, you will learn to carve acanthus leaves!
This is an excerpt from “From Truths to Tools” by George Walker and Jim Tolpin; Illustrated by Andrea Love.
Just out of curiosity, let’s see what happens when we draw a circle, then switch the dividers’ legs around. Being sure to keep the same setting (i.e. the radius of the first circle), we set the point anywhere on the rim and swing the other leg around to construct a second circle.
We now have before us two circles of the same size, which yields the birth of “symmetria” (symmetry) – one of the most useful and foundational principles in geometry (not to mention keeping the universe itself intact).
The intersection of the symmetrical circles at each other’s focal points is the geometric truth underlying a powerful layout tool called a spiling batten. To see how this wool works, follow the steps in the drawing.
1.) Swing an arc (about one-third of a circle) from a focal point.
2.) Keeping the same radius. swing back a little arc from any place on the first arc.
3.) Swing back another arc from a second point on the first arc. The intersection of these two small arcs is the location of the original focal point.
Be aware that you need to be careful to maintain the same setting for all these arcs.
A common application of spiling in boatbuilding is in the fitting of a boat plank perfectly between two other previously installed planks. We begin by tacking in place a thin piece of wood (the spiling batten) in the opening between the planks. Next, from station points we’ve made on the upper and lower planks (usually at the centerline of frame locations) we swing an arc onto the batten.
To avoid errors due to a change in the divider setting, we will record the divider span somewhere on the the batten to provide a double-check.
When we are done making arcs from all the station points, we remove the batten and lay it on the stock to be cut to shape. Then we swing two arcs from each arc drawn on the batten.
The intersection of these arcs will be the location of the original station point. Finally, we’ll use a bendable length of wood to connect the transferred station points onto the stock. Cut to the line and we are rewarded with a ready-to-plane-to-perfect fit.
